Seems like an edge case that Apple can solve by comparing phone behavior on a ski lift vs that of a car. There’s gotta be some patterns in the data that are distinctly skier behavior. However if they want to help those skiers that are truly in need of help, it gets much trickier.
It's probably not just the lifts. Anybody new to skis/snowboards is likely to do a lot of falling over.
(But if you're expecting to be frequently falling onto wet snow or hard ice, it's probably a good idea not to have a $1000 smartphone in your pocket...)
Learning to ski is certainly a particularly strong example of a case where you're likely to have a lot of false positives.
But, honestly, even with something like hiking, tripping over a tree root or something like that isn't exactly rare. I've taken a ton of spills over the years and fortunately nothing worse than some minor bloodshed or maybe a twisted something was involved. (And the one time it was something more serious I didn't actually fall but did have a serious bone break.)
I've been on the fence whether I ought to enable the feature on my watch.
It's not too difficult to solve actually. They could monitor for movement after the fall. If the person hasn't moved or has moved, but hasn't got up, then it should announce a warning (with enough time) before calling emergency services.
If they got up and have started walking again, its a false positive, or they don't need automatic help.
I guess that in the emergency case the phone will automatically determine the GPS position. For the fire departments it might make sense to discard the automated calls if the position is on a serviced skiing slope during the slopes operation times since there, in case of an anncident, in 99% of cases others are there for helping immediately. Also the emergency service would call the slopes emergency helpers anyway since they have the skidos ready for rescue on the slopes.
Exactly, this was first reported months ago and it should be easy to fix. Check location for ski slopes, see if they're moving normally again after 20-30 seconds, etc.
Maybe Apple is delaying the fix because these news stories are viral marketing for its crash detection feature?
